The mpox outbreak never ended in Africa. Now a deadlier strain is spreading
In response to new and resurging mpox outbreaks in multiple African countries, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention declared mpox a continent-wide public health emergency Tuesday. Although many countries outside of Africa rapidly contained an mpox pandemic that began in 2022, large outbreaks continued unabated in west and central Africa. And now, a deadlier strain is spreading across borders in Africa.
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Fortunately, public health agencies around the world acted quickly to improve disease surveillance efforts, increasing awareness among high-risk populations, particularly men who have sex with men, and encouraging safe sex practices. In the US and Europe, where there were just over 30,000 and 25,000 mpox cases respectively between May 2022 and May 2023, officials also disseminated over a million vaccine doses. Consequently, mpox transmission in most countries quickly dwindled. In May 2023, the World Health Organization lifted the emergency status.
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But outbreak response efforts in the DRC and other African countries have once again been hamstrung by the same challenges health officials faced during previous outbreaks and pandemics, including Covid: a lack of global solidarity and an unwillingness to share life-saving resources. While vaccine doses were rapidly disseminated in the US and Europe in 2022, vaccines are only now starting to trickle into the DRC. But even so, only a couple hundred thousand vaccines will be available for a population of more than 100 million people.
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